Stripe API

What it covers

A mature payments and billing API covering checkout, payment intents, subscriptions, invoicing, and platforms. The profile stays deliberately concise: use the linked official reference for endpoint schemas and current commercial terms.

Integration notes

Authenticate exactly as the provider documents, keep credentials out of client bundles, and retain upstream request identifiers when available. Pagination, retries, caching, and webhook verification should be implemented per product rather than inferred from another API.

Key endpoints

Endpoint	Description
POST /v1/customers	Create customer
GET /v1/customers/{id}	Customer details
POST /v1/payment_intents	Create payment intent
GET /v1/charges	List charges
POST /v1/refunds	Create refund
GET /v1/invoices	List invoices
POST /v1/subscriptions	Create subscription
GET /v1/balance	Account balance

Decision notes

Best suited to online payments and billing and marketplace and platform payments. Before production, verify verify webhook signatures. use idempotency keys for safely retried writes. Mutable limits, prices, and versions were checked on 2026-09-13 and should be rechecked at purchase or deployment time.

Python example: customers and charges (test mode)

import httpx
from httpx import BasicAuth

SECRET_KEY = "sk_test_your_key"  # TEST key — never use live keys in code samples
BASE = "https://api.stripe.com/v1"

def create_customer(email: str, name: str | None = None) -> dict:
    """Create a customer. Stripe uses form-encoded bodies with basic auth."""
    data = {"email": email}
    if name:
        data["name"] = name
    resp = httpx.post(
        f"{BASE}/customers", auth=BasicAuth(SECRET_KEY, ""), data=data, timeout=30
    )
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()

def list_charges(limit: int = 10) -> list[dict]:
    resp = httpx.get(
        f"{BASE}/charges", auth=BasicAuth(SECRET_KEY, ""), params={"limit": limit}, timeout=30
    )
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()["data"]

customer = create_customer("dev@example.com", "Dev Example")
print("created:", customer["id"])

Notes:

• Secret key goes in HTTP Basic auth username (password empty) — not a Bearer header
• Request bodies are application/x-www-form-urlencoded, not JSON
• Always develop against sk_test_* keys; live keys start sk_live_*
• Idempotency: send Idempotency-Key header on POSTs to safely retry
• Use the official stripe SDK in production — it handles retries, pagination, and webhooks